Papers, Please has always been an indie darling: and I do have a lot of respect for it! It’s one of the best examples to my mind of how mechanics can impart a mindset in the player, and how the mindset can tell a story all by itself. On some level, I do think it’s still one of the best examples of interacting with authoritarian power structures I’ve ever seen, and how it makes you think, feel, act within them. It is absolutely a triumph from a purely mechanical standpoint, and definitely deserves most of the accolades it got. I’m not here to argue Papers, Please is secretly bad: it’s not. It’s really good, and if you want a game that explores the ways mechanics can truly help you engage with and understand your relation to the concepts at play, you should absolutely play it. That being said, something has always bugged me about this game. Less for what it is on its own face, and more for the ways in which it interacts with the culture around us, and how the game doesn’t seem to recognize the context in which it has been released. I want to discuss how the context of a game can seriously impact the message it sends, and why that is a concern that should not be ignored.
So, to get the obvious out of the way: Papers, Please is clearly based on the Eastern Bloc in the 1900’s, pulling from the aesthetic of the USSR and the political tensions and happenings of the time. 3d lut creator 1.52. You’ve been drafted into the role of the border guard, dealing with the quickly changing policies and rules of the region, as a war has ended. Domestic policy will harshly punish you and your family for not upholding state policies in your job, no matter how inhumane. Broadly, then, this is clearly meant to be an allegory for the authoritarian tendencies of the USSR, and how such a system has impacts on the average people who must live in such a system. The aesthetics of the game, the music, all of it is clearly meant to evoke this time period and political unrest that came along with it. On the surface, I have very little issue with such a framing. The USSR was indeed an authoritarian state that perpetuated many imperialist tendencies, with the requisite impacts on the citizens such a system inevitably invites. It’s not a state worth defending, and it is a well known and striking example of an authoritarian state in history, making it a fair choice to frame allegorically as a critique and exploration of authoritarianism. The game itself avoids any bad history by making a fictional world instead of a piece of historical fiction, and this serves it well, leaving the focus on aesthetics and ideology instead of the fraught history that an indie game of this scope probably wasn’t equipped to handle. That being said, I don’t have an issue with this game… by itself. However, no work is released in a contextless void, and this is where I find Papers, Please tends to stumble. It was an indie game being released in the modern age to a primarily western audience, and man, it did not seem to understand the problems with that.
Papers, Please is a quirky little independent game, in which the player has to stop certain people from crossing the border into their country. Best calendar app laptop. The twist that makes this game unique comes in the form of. Papers, Please is a single-player “Dystopian Document Thriller” in which the player steps into the role of an immigration inspector in the fictional country of Arstotzka in the year 1982. As the player stands on the threshold between two different countries, a unique perspective of immigration and border security springs out of the mundane.
The red scare is an extremely well documented phenomenon in many of these areas, particularly in America. For a variety of political reasons (that I do NOT have time to get into), communist infiltration was a fearmongering tactic pushed by the state, along with a general distaste for the ideology being promoted. In particular, the overtly authoritarian structure of the USSR led the majority of the public to conflate communist ideology with authoritarian government structures. In essence, the west was framed as capitalist and capitalism being free, and the USSR being communist and communism being restrictive and authoritarian. Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that this definition of communism is hot nonsense: read even a tiny amount of theory and it’s clear that communism is an economic system and is matter of fact, stateless. Regardless of your feelings on the ideology, it is simply factual that communism and authoritarianism are separate entities, not hand in hand at all. Regardless, there has been a concerted effort in many western nations to conflate the two, and to make people think of authoritarianism as communism, inherently. This means that unfortunately, exposure to critiques of the authoritarian aspects of the USSR means that many people will assume that these critiques then apply to the ideology of communism across the board. Media wishing to discuss the USSR in an honest framing runs into this issue then, and without proper consideration is going to lead people into an inaccurate application of the message. Perhaps this is unfair, but it is a real consideration that needs to be taken in a culture so steeped in the effects of the red scare. Papers, Please does not really take this into account one bit.
So, here’s the problem. Papers, Please is clearly a pointed experience meant to only communicate ideas about authoritarianism. Nothing about the economic system of the fictional Arstotzka is told, and you’re even paid with bonuses and deduced pay for mistakes, something rather opposite to communist ideology. All the political elements of the game relate to the power structures of government, and plot points such as a citizen uprising focus on such issues, rather than the economics. The entire scope of the gameplay revolves around how an individual deals with harsh and uncompromising state policy, for crying out loud. Papers, Please, is so clearly about authoritarianism, and yet, the use of USSR aesthetics is inevitably going to mislead a lot of people into thinking it’s about the economic system of communism at the same time. I remember when I was younger, not as tuned into politics or history, and I played this game? Yeah, I genuinely thought this was a critique of what communism would lead to, about how the USSR’s stated goals would always lead to this. How many people with a similar level of engagement with these topics are going to take this away from the game, particularly in the culture they’re in? Maybe this is unfair to the game, but this is a genuine problem it doesn’t want to contend with. Understanding of leftist politics is not promoted in many areas of the world for many reasons, and a nuanced history of the USSR even less so. Microsoft remote desktop crashes. If you release a work that is going to mislead anyone with a baseline understanding of the topic, and you know most of the people who will engage will have that baseline understanding, is that not in some way irresponsible on the part of the creator? Papers, Please, implies the USSR was broadly not good for its citizens due to the authoritarian elements of the state, and while this is a reasonable assertion on its own, it is not a clear assertion within the context of a common western mindset.
I wonder how Papers, Please will come off in the future. In 100 years, perhaps the red scare will have passed, and somebody will want to go back and play this game. How will it come across then? Will the messages about authoritarianism come through clearer? If somebody does not associate the USSR’s brand of state with what leftist ideologies inherently are, will they not be misled by what this game is saying? It feels like this is the mindset that Papers, Please should be taking place in, clearly understanding what it’s about, and being able to engage with it on those honest terms. The game wants you to understand the specific messages and framing it provides, understanding how an oppressive state gets people to think. It’s not about anything else! And yet, the game seems to assume that players will come in with a clear and focused mind, but I’m sorry to say, that is not the reality this game released into. I would not be shocked if many people had their notions against “communism” in their mind strengthened as a result of playing this game, seeing it as a critique of this economic system because no part of the game really does much to push back against their faulty premise. I don’t know how fair this is to the game, but at the same time, I can’t deny that part of its legacy is showing people that their red scare cultural assumptions are correct. That’s a problem, right? We can talk all day about how Papers, Please would be taken in a void, how somebody would read it if they had no cultural exposure to the red scare, but really, that’s never going to happen. It was a game released primarily in western markets, it’s had most of its exposure in these areas, and it doesn’t seem to want to consider that. It wouldn’t have needed much, but even a little bit of consideration could have gone a long way.
Maybe this isn’t fair: isn’t it on the individual to properly understand what a work is putting out? Maybe, in some ways, but at the same time, regional considerations exist in creative works for a reason. Imagine if you made a story entirely based off a Chinese cultural touchstone, assuming the audience is familiar with it, and then released it primarily in America with no guidance for that audience. They’d be completely confused and lost about the primary scope of the story: they aren’t familiar with this touchstone! It wouldn’t be fair to expect them to be. This is why localization exists and takes time, because works often need to be slightly molded and fit into the area they’re releasing in to make sure the audience will get what’s being put down. While this isn’t localization, the underlying premise of a piece of work needing to match the audience where they stand is a common consideration. Fandom zines, for example, often proceeded on the assumption that the reader was already interested and needed no explanation of the fandom: but that style would never be used when trying to explain what’s up with this group to a newcomer. So much stuff in life is explicitly crafted to be suitable to the mindset of an intended audience, so when a piece of work clearly has failed to take this into account, I think that’s worth criticism. How much, how severe, and how much this reflects on the game? Well, that’s up to the individual.
I’ve made my stance clear: I think this game has clearly failed to consider how the messages it sends out will be taken, and as a result becomes lesser in the time and place it was released in. You can’t divorce games from the context around them, and as a result, I think this has severely muddied the legacy Papers, Please holds in a noticeable way. You might disagree: but I think it’s clear that, in some way, a failure to consider audience reactions has produced an effect of some kind. This doesn’t diminish what Papers, Please has done well, but a careful consideration about the ways in which the aesthetics used affected the audience response is important. I’ll still never forget how scared of the fictional government the mechanics made me, how it made me ignore the humanity of others for my own perceived safety. That said a lot to me, and it made me consider my own relation to power structures and how I act under them. But regardless, this game is not perfect, and I worry it ended up pushing an uncritical red scare view in many people because it failed to consider the mindset that they’d hold. Games are more than what they are in a void: they’re whole experiences that rely on the context and culture they’re being experienced in to truly form a picture of the effect the work will have. I think it’s extremely important to consider when games become lesser because of the world around them: perhaps it’s unfair. But then, games will never be experienced in a void. It’s just more honest to consider their effects as they really are.
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